Welcome to the top o’ the week: it’s Monday, September 8, 2025, and National Ampersand Day! Here’s one from my keyboard (hit “shift and 7”): &.
Wikipedia gives the history of this figure, which we still have on our keyboards: the symbol was originally derived from a Latin symbol that combined the letters “e” and “t” meaning “and”. The figure below shows its evolution from “et” to “&”. Does that mean it’s a meme?:
The ampersand can be traced back to the 1st century AD and the old Roman cursive, in which the letters E and T occasionally were written together to form a ligature (Evolution of the ampersand – figure 1). In the later and more flowing New Roman Cursive, ligatures of all kinds were extremely common; figures 2 and 3 from the middle of 4th century are examples of how the et-ligature could look in this script. During the later development of the Latin script leading up to Carolingian minuscule (9th century) the use of ligatures in general diminished. The et-ligature, however, continued to be used and gradually became more stylized and less revealing of its origin (figures 4–6).
It’s also National Date Nut Bread Day, National Pledge of Allegiance Day marking the day in 1892 when it first appeared in a magazine (it was recognized as official by Congress in 1942, with the words “under God” added only in 1954), and finally International Literacy Day.
Below is a 2024 world map from the U.S. Career Institute showing literacy as the percentage of people 15 years of age or older who can read and write.
Scandinavian countries like Norway and Finland have the highest rates (about 100%), while countries of central Africa have the lowest rates—less than 40%. Note that the U.S. and Canada aren’t perfect, and if you dig deeper, you find that things are grim in the U.S. Here are U.S. data from “a 2023 study conducted by the Department of Educations National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) as part of the OECD’s Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies.”
Adults scoring below Level 1 can comprehend simple sentences and short paragraphs with minimal structure but will struggle with multi-step instructions or complex sentences, while those at Level 1 can locate explicitly cued information in short texts, lists, or simple digital pages with minimal distractions but will struggle with multi-page texts and complex prose.
. . . In 2023, 28% of adults scored at or below Level 1, 29% at Level 2, and 44% at Level 3 or above. Adults scoring in the lowest levels of literacy increased 9 percentage points between 2017 and 2023. In 2017, 19% of U.S. adults achieved a Level 1 or below in literacy, while 48% achieved the highest levels.
Anything below Level 3 is considered “partially illiterate”
This means that 57% of Americans are partially illiterate, with 28% struggling with complex sentences and having trouble with “multi-step instructions.” How can that be? And it’s getting worse!
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the September 8 Wikipedia page.
Da Nooz:
*Obituaries first. Nobel Laureate and discoverer of reverse transcriptase David Baltimore died at 87 on Saturday (h/t Matthew).
David Baltimore, a biologist who in 1975 won a Nobel Prize for a startling discovery that seemed to rock the foundations of the fledgling field of molecular biology, died on Saturday at his home in Woods Hole, Mass. He was 87.
The cause was complications of several cancers, his wife, Alice Huang, said.
Dr. Baltimore was only 37 when he made his Nobel-winning discovery, upending what was called the central dogma, which stated that information in cells flowed in only one direction — from DNA to RNA to the synthesis of proteins. Dr. Baltimore showed that information can also flow in the reverse direction, from RNA to DNA. The key was finding a viral enzyme, called a transcriptase, that reversed the process.
The discovery led to an understanding of retroviruses and viruses, including H.I.V., that use this enzyme. Today, gene therapies with disabled retroviruses are used to insert good genes into patients’ DNA to correct genetic diseases.
*I’m not to keen to post much about politics these days as everything is going to hell. But anyway, the WSJ has an article about a phenomenon I didn’t know about: South Sudan’s Great Antelope Migration, which involves six million animals: three times the size of the famous wildebeest migration of the Serengeti. If you time it right, you can see the wildebeest, but the antelope, well, it’s nearly impossible to get to the site in Sudan. Read the article (archived here), and I’ll put a video below (the article also contains some video). The article is archived here, but it lacks the videos and animations.
Deep in the hinterlands of this East African country is one of the greatest natural events you’ll never see.
Six million antelope swarm across an area the size of Illinois, a mass movement of mammals triple the size of the Serengeti wildebeest trek, the go-to migration for TV nature shows. The animals storm through sparse forests and open savannah, trickles of antelope merging to become streams, streams swelling and spreading until the landscape is filled with thundering rivers of white-eared kob, tiang, Mongalla gazelle and Bohor reedbuck. A single herd can number 100,000 antelope, or more.
“This is the greatest migration of large fauna in the world, including the oceans,” says renowned naturalist Mike Fay, who is conducting an antelope head-count in South Sudan. “The entire planet should be amazed that this exists.”
Yet the Great Nile Migration remains virtually unknown to outsiders and preposterously difficult to witness. Would-be visitors have to travel to a country that’s been engulfed in on-again-off-again war for decades, and is on again. Then there’s the terrain. The animals move through a landscape with virtually no roads, not even rough safari tracks, and are easily viewable only from helicopters or slow-flying ultralight aircraft.
The WSJ got to go to Sudan to report, and their article is really good.
It’s a migration as old as time, but, conservationists fear, one that might not last much longer.
Although scientists and, of course, locals have known about the migration for years, only recently have researchers understood its staggering dimensions. In 2023, African Parks conducted an aerial survey revealing the movement included some 5.1 million white-eared kob, which generally move in a U shape in and around Boma National Park, sometimes crossing into Ethiopia’s Gambella National Park.
The animals stop to eat and breed, but they’re on the move much of the year. The estimated total migration comes to nearly six million animals. By contrast, roughly two million blue wildebeest and common zebra traverse the Serengeti between Tanzania and Kenya.
. . .African Parks and the South Sudanese government would like to develop ecotourism around the migration, but have so far been frustrated. African Parks built a small tented safari camp, but the first clients to book canceled after fighting broke out earlier this year between political factions in the north of the country.
South Sudanese rebels fought for decades to break away from Sudan. The South, mostly animist and Christian, finally won independence from the largely Muslim North in 2011, but quickly descended into civil war along ethnic lines. The war ended in 2020, but this year’s fighting suggests stability remains a distant hope.
Scientists aren’t sure why the herds move as they do. They assume the antelope are driven by the quest for grass, water and breeding grounds.
But researchers are confident the animals try to avoid people, and that has helped them survive.
Enormous swaths of the flatlands in and around Badingilo National Park flood during rainy season. The animals don’t mind, but the floods make the area unappealing for human settlement. Around the remote Jwam Swamp, dry-season huts, abandoned by residents during the rains, protrude like small islands from the floodwaters.
The interethnic violence that plagues South Sudan has also, to a degree, helped protect the migration.
The included videos are great, there’s an animation of the route (four species of antelope participate), and I’ll put a stunning video below. I want to go!!
*The Catholic Church has a right to canonize anyone they want but the criteria seem to be getting lax. The latest rules say that any declared saint has to be heroic in virtue, blessed by God, and have been someone whose intercession led to the occurrence of two miracles. This week they canonized the “first millennial saint”: Carlo Acutis, a 15-year-old Brit who lived in Italy. Called the “patron saint of the Internet,” Acutis is described this way in Wikipedia:
Born in London and raised in Milan, he developed an early interest in computers and video games, teaching himself programming and web design and assisting his parish and school with digital projects. On September 7, 2025, together with Pier Giorgio Frassati, he was canonized by the Catholic Church.
Active in parish life, he served as a catechist and helped inspire several people to convert to Catholicism. He later created a website documenting Eucharistic miracles and Marian apparitions. He was diagnosed with acute promyelocytic leukaemia and died at the age of fifteen. Since his death, his relics have been displayed in Assisi and his exhibitions on Eucharistic miracles have traveled worldwide.
In 2020, he was beatified by the Catholic Church after the recognition of a proposed 2013 miracle in Brazil attributed to his intercession, while a second miracle in Costa Rica remains unconfirmed in 2024. There is no evidence of any miracle having occurred currently nor anything linking Acutis to the occurrence. Acutis is regarded as a model for young believers and was canonized as a saint on 7 September 2025, alongside Pier Giorgio Frassati. Acutis is referred to as the “Patron Saint of the Internet”, “God’s Influencer” and the “first millennial saint”.
His pals, though, couldn’t vouch for his piety:
In March 2025, The Economist published an article stating that Acutis’s childhood best friend claimed he did not remember Acutis as a “very pious boy”, nor did he even know that Carlo was religious. His schoolmates testified that he was kind, but did not remember him to be publicly devout although they did note that he expressed religious viewpoints at times. These accounts were disputed by Carlo’s mother, Antonia.
Here are the requisite two miracles, though the second seems somewhat doubtful:
On 14 November 2019, the Vatican’s Medical Council of the Congregation for the Causes of Saints expressed a positive opinion about a miracle in Brazil attributed to Acutis’s intercession. In 2020 the Catholic Church recognised the curing of a child’s pancreatic disease as a miracle attributed to Acutis’s intercession. On the death anniversary of Acutis, Luciana Vianna had taken to Mass her son, Mattheus, who had the congenital defect of an annular pancreas which made eating difficult. Beforehand, she had prayed a novena asking for Acutis’s intercession. During the prayer service following Mass, Mattheus kissed the clothing relic of Acutis and asked he should not “throw up as much”. Immediately following the Mass, he told his mother that he felt healed and asked for solid foods when they arrived home. Until then, he had been on an all-liquid diet. Following this, Acutis’s mother told the press that her son had appeared to her in dreams saying that he would be not only beatified but also canonized a saint in the future. After a detailed investigation, Pope Francis confirmed the miracle’s authenticity in a decree on 21 February 2020, leading to Acutis’s beatification.
On 23 May 2024, Pope Francis recognized a second miracle attributed to the intercession of Acutis. The miracle attributed to his intercession occurred in 2022, when a Costa Rican woman named Valeria Valverde, had fallen off her bike and suffered a brain haemorrhage, with doctors giving her a low chance of survival. Her mother, Lilliana, prayed for the intercession of Acutis and visited his tomb. The same day, Valverde began to breathe independently again and was able to walk the next day with all evidence of the haemorrhage having disappeared.
I asked my primary-care physician, Dr. Alex Lickerman to determine whether these remissions could occur spontaneously, and got this reply, quoted with permission:
RE: annular pancreas, symptoms like nausea and vomiting may come and go. This can be caused by inflammation of the annular tissue, which can temporarily narrow the duodenum further and cause a blockage that later subsides. The temporary relief of symptoms is not a spontaneous cure, but a fluctuation in the severity of the obstruction. Also, this sounds entirely self-reported. Who knows what this kid was or wasn’t able to eat before his miracle “cure”?
The second is even sillier. Depending on the type and size of a brain hemorrhage, people can recover. We would need much more detail to assess how accurate the doctors’ prediction of “a low chance of survival” was.
Miracles? I would like to know who judges the medical stuff!
*Luana called my attention to a 2025 killing in Charlotte, N.C. that has been almost completely neglected by the mainstream media. Ironically, the best coverage seems to be on Wikipedia (excerpts below); this is making the news now because the video of the stabbing was released only on Friday.
The Murder of Iryna Zarutska occurred on August 22, 2025, at the East/West Boulevard light rail station on the Lynx Blue Line in Charlotte, North Carolina, United States. Iryna Zarutska, a 23-year-old Ukrainian refugee who had fled the Russian invasion of Ukraine, was fatally stabbed in an unprovoked attack by Decarlos Brown Jr., a 34-year-old black man with an extensive criminal history. The incident has not drawn significant attention even though Zarutska’s background was a refugee seeking safety in the United States, a perceived lack of media coverage of black-on-white violence, and raised concerns about public safety on Charlotte’s public transportation system.
Iryna Zarutska was born in Kyiv, Ukraine and arrived with her family to the United States in 2022, fleeing the ongoing war following Russia’s invasion of her home country. Zarutska held an art degree from a Kyiv college and was improving her English with hopes of becoming a veterinary assistant. According to a GoFundMe page created by her family and cited in media reports, Zarutska had settled in Charlotte, North Carolina, hoping for a new beginning.
The suspect, Decarlos Brown Jr., was a 34-year-old homeless man with a lengthy criminal record dating back to 2011. Brown had been convicted of multiple offenses, including robbery with a dangerous weapon, breaking and entering, felony larceny, and misuse of the 911 system. He had served approximately six years in a North Carolina prison and was released in September 2020. Subsequent arrests included charges for assault on a female in 2022 and misuse of the 911 system in January 2025, where he claimed a “man-made material” was controlling his body. His mental capacity to stand trial was questioned in July 2025, with a court-ordered forensic evaluation pending at the time of the incident.
. . .On the evening of August 22, 2025, at approximately 9:55 p.m., Iryna Zarutska was at the East/West Boulevard light rail station in Charlotte’s South End neighborhood. Surveillance footage released on 5 September 2025 by authorities shows Zarutska boarding the train and sitting in front of Decarlos Brown, her accused killer. For four minutes, Zarutska, wearing headphones and using her phone, is unaware as Brown glances at her, pulls a pocketknife from his hoodie, and flips it open. He then lunges, holding her head and stabbing her three times in the neck. Zarutska, visibly scared, collapses 30 seconds later. Passengers react but initially freeze; one eventually aids her, followed by others. Brown, seen wiping blood from his hand with his hoodie, exits the train two minutes later.[6][7]
She was pronounced dead at the scene. Brown was arrested and taken to Atrium Health for treatment. He was charged with first-degree murder upon his release from the hospital.[1][8]
The Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department (CMPD) has not disclosed the motive for the attack. The investigation remains ongoing, with CMPD’s Homicide Unit, led by Detective Buhr, urging the public to provide any relevant information.
A picture of Zarutska is shown below in the first tweet.
If you click on the screenshot, you can see the very start of the attack reported on a local news site (the stabbing itself and its sequelae are not available):
Luana calls this “misplaced empathy” from “progressives”, as the murderer should have been locked up a long time ago in a mental hospital (he had been arrested 14 times and spent a fair amount of time in jail. Clearly, as a free man he posed a danger to society, but the mayor showed sympathy for him and not for his victim.
— Steven (@Stroy7100) September 6, 2025
You’d think that this story, of a hopeful Ukrainian immigrant wanting to seize the American dream, but then killed by a homicidal maniac with a long arrest record, would have made the national media either last year or today (maybe it will now that the video has been released). But this tweet from today shows that the coverage in major media has been nil.
0 AP stories on this deadly attack
0 PBS stories on this deadly attack
0 NYT stories on this deadly attack
0 NPR stories on this deadly attack
0 WSJ stories on this deadly attack
0 BBC stories on this deadly attack
0 CNN stories on this deadly attack
0 WAPO stories on this… pic.twitter.com/962qmFOBNm— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) September 7, 2025
Even Wikipedia offers several antiwoke theories for the lack of coverage, and you can see these above. Regardless, the mayor is a cold-hearted jerk and we have to do better assessing people for mental illness and judging whether they’re a danger to society. After 14 crimes, including larceny, armed robbery, and making threats, you’d think that keep him away from society.
*From reader Howie; a cool story in The Atlantic about . Click on headline to go to archived version:
Some excerpts:
Some 24 years ago, Diana Bianchi peered into a microscope at a piece of human thyroid and saw something that instantly gave her goosebumps. The sample had come from a woman who was chromosomally XX. But through the lens, Bianchi saw the unmistakable glimmer of Y chromosomes—dozens and dozens of them. “Clearly,” Bianchi told me, “part of her thyroid was entirely male.”
The reason, Bianchi suspected, was pregnancy. Years ago, the patient had carried a male embryo, whose cells had at some point wandered out of the womb. They’d ended up in his mother’s thyroid—and, almost certainly, a bunch of other organs too—and taken on the identities and functions of the female cells that surrounded them so they could work in synchrony. Bianchi, now the director of the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, was astonished: “Her thyroid had been entirely remodeled by her son’s cells,” she said.
The woman’s case wasn’t a one-off. Just about every time an embryo implants and begins to grow, it dispatches bits of itself into the body housing it. The depositions begin at least as early as four or five weeks into gestation. And they settle into just about every sliver of our anatomy where scientists have checked—the heart, the lungs, the breast, the colon, the kidney, the liver, the brain. From there, the cells might linger, grow, and divide for decades, or even, as many scientists suspect, for a lifetime, assimilating into the person that conceived them. They can almost be thought of as evolution’s original organ transplant, J. Lee Nelson, of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center in Seattle, told me. Microchimerism may be the most common way in which genetically identical cells mature and develop inside two bodies at once.
These cross-generational transfers are bidirectional. As fetal cells cross the placenta into maternal tissues, a small number of maternal cells migrate into fetal tissues, where they can persist into adulthood. Genetic swaps, then, might occur several times throughout a life. Some researchers believe that people may be miniature mosaics of many of their relatives, via chains of pregnancy: their older siblings, perhaps, or their maternal grandmother, or any aunts and uncles their grandmother might have conceived before their mother was born. “It’s like you carry your entire family inside of you,” Francisco Úbeda de Torres, an evolutionary biologist at the Royal Holloway University of London, told me.
All of that makes microchimerism—named in homage to the part-lion, part-goat, part-dragon chimera of Greek myth—more common than pregnancy itself. It’s thought to affect every person who has carried an embryo, even if briefly, and anyone who has ever inhabited a womb. Other mammals—mice, cows, dogs, our fellow primates—seem to haul around these cellular heirlooms too. But borrowed cells don’t always show up in the same spots, or in the same numbers. In many cases, microchimeric cells are thought to be present at concentrations on the order of one in 1 million—a level that, “for a lot of biological assays, is approaching or at the limit of detection,” Sing Sing Way, an immunologist and a pediatrician at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital, told me.
Some scientists have argued that cells so sparse and inconsistent couldn’t possibly have meaningful effects. Even among microchimerism researchers, hypotheses about what these cells do—if anything at all—remain “highly controversial,” Way said. But many experts contend that microchimeric cells aren’t just passive passengers, adrift in someone else’s genomic sea. They are genetically distinct entities in a foreign residence, with their own evolutionary motivations that may clash with their landlord’s. And they might hold sway over many aspects of health: our susceptibility to infectious or autoimmune disease, the success of pregnancies, maybe even behavior. If these cells turn out to be as important as some scientists believe they are, they might be one of the most underappreciated architects of human life.
Well, I’m somewhat dubious given that these cells can’t make their way from the tissues into the germ cells, haven’t been found there so far as I know, and thus would seem to have a minimal effect on evolution, which requires passing genes among generations. (Remember, all cells have the same complement of genes save for those on the Y chromosome.) But there is some possible explanatory and experimental value in this finding: for example, it may explain why patients with organ transplants do better when the organs come from their mother than their father (the patient’s body already contains some maternal cells which may tamp down any immune rejection.) But there’s also potential harm: these cells could exacerbate autoimmune diseases. As always, stay tuned.
*You’d think that writer Elizabeth Gilbert, world famous for her memoir Eat Pray Love (a paean to food, travel, and the search for amour, later turned into a film starring Julia Roberts), would be happy, for the book ends with her finding the love she sought. And she was bloody rich. But no dice. I did read the book, which I found sappy, but it sold 30 million copies. However, her post-book life (she’s written others) was tumultuous: she went through two husbands, a number of boyfriends, and she’s quoted as saying that she “careened from one intimate entanglement to the next—dozens of them—without so much as a day off between romances.”
Yesterday’s NYT reports Gilbert’s life as even sadder than we knew, as recounted in her latest memoir. (NYT article archived here.)
In July 2017, the author Elizabeth Gilbert posted a message to her million-plus Facebook followers about her partner, Rayya Elias, who was dying of pancreatic and liver cancer. The message featured a video of Elias singing a song they’d written together called “Happy Home,” and Gilbert ended on a hopeful note, telling readers it was possible to find “pockets of paradise on earth, even through all the suffering and loss and pain.”
By then, Gilbert’s audience knew about Elias, her longtime friend and hairdresser turned lover. She had announced their relationship the previous fall, revealing that she had ended her marriage to be with Elias, who doctors predicted had six months to live.
But the stoic message Gilbert shared with her readers — many of them devotees since her blockbuster 2006 memoir “Eat, Pray, Love” turned her into a self-help icon — masked a much bleaker, sometimes sinister story.
Elias, a former heroin addict who had been sober for years, slid back into addiction after her diagnosis. She stayed up all night in their East Village penthouse, ingesting whiskey, morphine, Vicodin, marijuana, fentanyl and thousands of dollars worth of cocaine, which Gilbert bought from teenagers in the neighborhood.
She had become abusive and paranoid, picking invisible bugs off her skin, ranting about police surveillance, lashing out at Gilbert over imaginary failings, and refusing to let Gilbert sleep or outsource care to a home aide. To cope with the stress, Gilbert was self-medicating with booze, Xanax, Ambien, psilocybin and MDMA.
Around the time she posted the video of Elias singing, things had gotten so bad that Gilbert decided the only way to save herself was murder. Exhausted and terrified, she planned to replace Elias’s morphine with sleeping pills, then cover her with enough fentanyl patches to kill her. She had swapped the pills and was prepared to act but abandoned the plan when Elias sensed something was up and confronted her.
Looking back on that moment, which she recounts with forensic detail in her new memoir, “All the Way to the River,” Gilbert still can’t believe how close she came to killing the love of her life, and how big the chasm became between her inspirational public persona and her hellish private life.
Crikey, who knew? The memoir could have been called “Love, shoot up, plot to kill.” Fortunately, Gilbert has become sober, but also celibate: a very different outcome from what you’d suspect from her best-seller:
Now 56, sober and celibate and committed to a 12-step program for sex and love addiction, Gilbert radiates calm and composure. With her close shaved graying hair and soft smile lines and crow’s feet, recently liberated after she stopped using Botox and fillers, she has the serene bearing of a monk — a monk with a sly, self-deprecating sense of humor. When I asked about how close she came to committing murder, Gilbert replied, “It seemed like a great idea!” a response so absurd and unfiltered that we both burst out laughing.
And about her new book:
. . .Early reactions suggest the memoir will be polarizing. On Goodreads, some fans have praised it as “radiantly tender” and “devastatingly vulnerable,” while other readers have expressed skepticism that borders on hostility. After an excerpt was published in New York magazine, some online commentators slammed Gilbert for writing “narcissistic drivel,” “mining her wife’s death for content” and for “telling us how to live and create when she so clearly doesn’t have a clue.”
Some of Gilbert’s close friends said it’s unsurprising that she has performed a public autopsy on her destructive and dysfunctional relationship patterns.
“I don’t think she really believes in shame,” said the author Glennon Doyle, a friend of Gilbert’s. “She’s always writing about losing yourself and finding yourself.”
And although Gilbert is famous for writing a series of books that read like self-help-advice (including EPL), I doubt this one falls into that genre.
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili hears Time’s wingéd chariot drawing near:
Hili: I’m watching time slip by.
Me: So?
Hili: It scares me.
In Polish:
Hili: Patrzę jak mija chwila.
Ja: I co?
Hili: Przeraża mnie to.
*******************
From Now That’s Wild. Get it?
From Things With Faces. Is it a duck?
From Susan:
Masih is still on the lam, perhaps forever, so I’ll make JKR her substitute until the time that Ms. Alinejad returns.
This was reposted by Rowling. Note the coppers trying to obstruct the filming. Bindel is well known in the UK but much less known in the US, so you can read about her here.
So let me get this straight. A lesbian is thrown out of Pride at the behest of a heterosexual Member of Parliament who of course is a Liberal Democrat. What a travesty. https://t.co/Cpc9WHQQJH
— Joanna Cherry KC (@joannaccherry) September 6, 2025
From Steve Stewart-Williams; faking wokeness:
Faking wokeness to fit in: A new study finds that nearly nine in ten students fake more progressive views than they really hold, often to appease professors or stay in their peers’ good graces.
[Link below.] pic.twitter.com/TvLK1xnIl1
— Steve Stewart-Williams (@SteveStuWill) August 14, 2025
From Malcolm; “If it fits, I sits.” And RIP Maru, who passed away a few days ago.
Perfectly fit pic.twitter.com/db8p6EGACw
— cats with powerful aura (@PowerfulAuraX) August 22, 2025
Two from my feed. First, a very lucky d*g:
His friends won’t believe him pic.twitter.com/zvZru8IvE6
— Puppies 🐶 (@PuppiesIover) September 6, 2025
I hope this otter was an orphan and wasn’t separated from its mom. Sound up.
A girl noticed an otter has been following her boat, and then pic.twitter.com/fM2g47ugB4
— Gabriele Corno (@Gabriele_Corno) September 6, 2025
One I reposted from The Auschwitz Memorial:
Italian Jewish mother 28, and her infant both gassed upon arrival at Auschwitz.
— Jerry Coyne (@evolutionistrue.bsky.social) 2025-09-08T10:14:09.324Z
Two posts from Dr. Cobb. First, a snuffling aardvark. We got close to a burrow in South Africa, but I never saw one:
Tilli the aardvark reporting for duty: professional digger, dirt enthusiast, and all-around tunnel queen. 👑 Tilli digs because she loves it. Go digging with our adorable 20-year-old aardvark. It's two minutes of pure aardvark joy. 💕📹: Assistant curator Maureen
— Point Defiance Zoo & Aquarium (@ptdefiancezoo.bsky.social) 2025-08-28T03:59:54.042Z
. . . and a lovely deep-sea octopus:
Graneledone @schmidtocean.bsky.social 831 #uruguaysub200 #MarineLife
A THOUGHT FOR TODAY:
If more politicians in this country were thinking about the next generation instead of the next election, it might be better for the United States and the world. -Claude Pepper, senator and representative (8 Sep 1900-1989)
The State as the Father, sacrificing itself for the population as its children.
Meanwhile the British police have arrested a man for calling someone a muppet. Video of the arrest, with a policeman explaining how “distressed” that person was to have been called a “muppet”, here.
I saw this on twitter and it made me laugh.
“Its time to put on makeup….”*
🙂
D.A.
NYC
*Age sensitive cultural meme: Boomers and Xers only.
HA! Can’t believe you read Gilbert’s terrible book. Prob like that 70s blockbuster “Emmanuel” novel?
Gotta hand it to you, PCC(E), you don the flame resistant gloves and pick up and seek the worst stuff in (presumably) your airport bookstore visits. So we don’t have to!
Gilbert – like many of her ilk is an obvious narcissist, probably a psychopath (Hare Psychopathy Checklist).. from a guess here, I never read her book.
Though.. I don’t want to harsh on elite writers with time on their hands holed up in apartments above South Manhattan taking too many interesting chemicals. She’s got the Money, why not? – (though it isn’t cool to kill people and write crappy books).
Her intellectual descendants are of course insta-influencers, also 20s tiktokers telling us about Palestine or other current issues while doing their make up…
Were she still hot, and sober, she’d be doing that.
(sigh)
D.A.
NYC
I initially read “tiktokers” as tik-toke-ers; thanks for the laugh.
Why can’t American read? I think the answer is probably complex, but I think Progressive pedagogy will probably do. (By the way, what counts as literate for that study? Is a person in the US who is literate in Spanish but not English considered literate?)
“Progressive pedagogy”
The dialectical hybrid of Paulo Freire’s Critical Pedagogy and The Fetzer Institute’s Transformative Social-Emotional Learning :
“The critical turn radicalized the field.
Since its beginnings in the 1970s and 1980s, critical educational scholarship has also pushed far beyond the Marxist tradition and its focus on political economy and social class. ”
-Issac Gottesman, 2016
“we’re not just altering knowledge ; we’re altering consciousness and creating new kinds of subjectivities.”
-Henry Giroux
Also see Joe Kincheloe’s Critical Constructivism primer.
Part of the problem begins with the hijacking of the word “critical” from its use in the expression critical thinking to its more recent use in the expression critical theory.
Yep …
I think the original (German translated) expression was critique, and criticism… I was meaning to follow the expressions back in detail, but pfff … it’s basically there in the writings… that then appeared alongside the physics/chemistry/biology/problem-solving sense in “critical thinking”…. as in, “bare essentials, the necessities, sufficient-or-not” – which is clearly all kinds of good.
Aside : Hegel took “science” and “scientific” as well, for his own context, but again, note there is German translation… why they do this I chalk up to Enlightenment Envy…
… there I go – I got started again!
And don’t forget “dialectical materialism“.
The podcast series Sold a Story is one possible answer. It goes into how reading is taught in schools in the US. It is quite interesting how it came to be what it is and how hard it has been to change it:
https://features.apmreports.org/sold-a-story/
From the website:
“There’s an idea about how children learn to read that’s held sway in schools for more than a generation — even though it was proven wrong by cognitive scientists decades ago. Teaching methods based on this idea can make it harder for children to learn how to read.”
My two cents is that reading literacy comes with doing a lot of reading for enjoyment. But young people today do less reading since they spend so much time staring at pixels on their phone.
Just one more quote – just popped in my head – but directly relevant, bold added :
“Reading is not exhausted merely by decoding the written word or written language, but rather anticipated by and extending into knowledge of the world. Reading the world precedes reading the word, and the subsequent reading of the word cannot dispense with continually reading the world. Language and reality are dynamically intertwined. The understanding attained by critical reading of a text implies perceiving the relationship between text and context.”
-Paulo Freire
THE IMPORTANCE OF THE ACT OF READING
Paulo Freire and Loretta Slover
The Journal of Education
Vol. 165, No. 1, LITERACY AND IDEOLOGY (WINTER 1983), pp. 5-11
(Available via Jstor).
So, we can see now, the students are in fact gaining literacy – it’s just they are assessed by irrelevant criteria in such studies (on Freire’s view).
tldr: They stopped teaching phonics.
Not my field, but just a little thought shows that abandoning phonics (which IIRC used to be called “sounding out”) was worse than stupid. Now it’s called “decoding”, which is actually a more accurate description.¹ The trainee reader presumably already knows how to speak, so they already know the language itself; they now only need to learn the rules and exceptions for mapping the words on the page into sounds. Duh.
(Yes, English spelling is much less phonetic than many (most?) other languages, so there are lots of exceptions to learn. But that is still very much easier than learning to read a non-alphabetic language such as Chinese.)
Or have I really missed the boat here?
. . . . .
¹ A rare event in the (d)evolution of educational terminology. Eschew sesquipedalian obscurantisms.
Freire’s conscientization develops with codification followed by decodification – the means by which the student awakens to critical consciousness of their social conditions.
Someone is trying to have the Wikipedia article about the killing of a Ukrainian refugee by a mentally ill homeless black criminal that you discussed in your post deleted. Unreal.
Announced today, Rick Davies, co-founder of Supertramp, died two days ago. He had managed to survive multiple myeloma for a remarkable ten years. The best musician that Swindon produced:
Andy Partridge, for me.
Wow. I’ve always liked this group. One does not see much of this musicianship these days.
First, when I was a kid, the occasional date nut bread in a can was an exotic and welcome addition to our otherwise kosher brisket, chicken, and potatoes larder.
Thanks for the literacy overview. It is absolutely unacceptable that we continue to pass and graduate children who cannot read. The methodology to teach children how to read and write is known but requires redirection of resources into one-on-one supplemental time in grades prek-1 and maybe 2. But I continue to see a simple lack of political will by local school boards to do it. Talk about real racism! Not caring enough to assure all children can read? When the vast majority of those children are from poor families and the majority of those at least here in the South, have been black. But there is a soft racism that says we should not require them to learn before they are passed on to the next grade and now there seems to be woke, decolonization storms actively claiming that reading, maths, and enlightenment processes are part of Western culture aimed at continued subjugation of blacks and descendants of slaves. I agree with DrB that the finer details of these studies may show things to be even worse, but no matter, at the highest level, the fact that we are not at 100% should be an embarrassing indictment of our political and educationalist leadership. You kids get off my lawn!
Well, if we are serious about the decolonization imperative, I guess we have to just leave them to it, then. Who are we to tell them what they should want? As long as black students admitted to and graduated from decolonized medical schools operating under this rubric can be constrained to practise in deprived black neighbourhoods where no one else now has to, everyone should be happy, right?
On a lighter note,
Weevil Weevil Rock You
Classy, but they missed out on the chance to post a sheep picture 🙂
I don’t recognise the two insects (or whatever they are) to the left of the rock, but I assume they are weevils?
If so then yes, I got it…
Re the “miracles” by the patron saint of the Internet: hard eye roll here this morning with my coffee.
I thought former US Vice President Al Gore was the patron saint of the internet.
Hahaha. Maybe he was beat out by a holy hanging chad.
Holy hanging chad- an excellent turn of phrase!
Was Chad hanged? What for?
Perhaps for punching.
I’d consider this to be some good news in politics for PCC(E). Hope this counts:
https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/quebec-to-ban-prayer-in-public
The provincial legislation aims at groups of Muslims who throw down prayers mats in public places like sidewalks and parks, sometimes even streets at busy intersections and at least go through the motions of praying during political demonstrations, usually against Israel these days. They disrupt the movements of passerby in a classic passive-aggressive intimidation game. People encountering them at the entrance, say, to a Jewish delicatessen hesitate, wondering, “Am I allowed to step over and around them? Would stepping on the prayer mat, even if I avoided their fingers, be a form of assault, or blasphemy for all I know, that I would get arrested for? Guess I’d better shop somewhere else today.” And in the street of course you’re not allowed to run them over.
In America, such a law would fail as an infringement on freedom of speech or, less cogently, on the free exercise of religion. It might fail in Canada, too, at first blush. However, the Canadian Constitution contains a Parliamentary Supremacy Clause under which a federal or provincial legislature can declare a law beyond the scope of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, making it immune to being struck down by the Courts. The Québec Government will probably invoke this “notwithstanding” clause to guarantee its enforceability. It has at least twice in the past on French language supremacy and another laïcité law is before the Courts now. The Alberta Government will probably have to invoke it to get its “Skrmetti” law into force.
Canadian free-speech supporters were dismayed when the Notwithstanding Clause was added at the last minute during constitutional deliberations in the 1980s. However, the protection of speech in the Charter is largely illusory — more like Britain’s, really — and our woke Courts have largely used the Charter to protect fashionable things like affirmative action, euthanasia, and climate change fads, anything but English speech. So notwithstand away, I say to Québec. In Canada, this is as good as it gets.
Yes, Leslie.
This new obnoxious public prayer Thing is pretty new. Seems to have started in the UK (of course, the Islamic Republic of Britain).
Wildly inappropriate. I’ve never seen it in person or even reported in the Islamosphere – like in the west there are plenty of mosques.
One area of creeping Islam I dread is the call to prayer which bedeviled my mornings and days in that part of the world. The Swiss are good at shutting that stuff down – let’s hope we are also.
D.A.
NYC
Maybe fight fiction with fiction: Apply KJV’s 1 Samuel 25:22 or 2 Kings 9:8 to rugs rather than walls.
When I saw those Biblical references I was hoping they were what I thought they were. I wasn’t disappointed. That’s brilliant. Only works if you’re a guy though.
(Hint to readers: it has to be the King James Version.)
My grandfather always rolled his eyes at some contemporary of his who was wont to pick up the Bible and declaim randomly from it. In my memory it was a conductor on freight trains whom my grandfather as brakeman shared a caboose with. It would get where Granddad would mutter to my grandmother when he got home about wanting to toss him off the train. Anyway, one day out on the road, the fellow picked up the Bible and said something like, “As the Lord says, in [checking the page to see where he had opened it] Second Kings, ‘For the whole house of Ahab shall perish: and I will cut off from Ahab him that’ … and so-on and so-forth!….”
Shirley, I hope they named her Anne Sofie von Otter.
+1
Spectacular video of wildlife in South Sudan. I had no idea! How can such a large migration and giant bounty of wildlife be largely unknown? It’s amazing to me.
I did read about the horrible killing in Charlotte. I’m pretty sure that it was covered on one or more of the news outlets, maybe NewsNation. I feel so bad for that innocent woman. When I enter a subway train or get on a bus, I automatically scan the other passengers and avoid people that look like they might not be “right.” Some of them aren’t right, as homeless and mentally ill people often ride public transportation. This guy should never have been on the street.
I’ve read about microchimerism now and then, but I didn’t realize how pervasive it is. I’ll have to check out Wu’s article. She writes some interesting articles in the Atlantic.
On NewsNation: https://www.newsnationnow.com/crime/ukrainian-refugee-killed-random-stabbing-north-carolina-train/
For decades in Melbourne, Tokyo and then Manhattan I took the subway or bus every day (I don’t drive). One really doesn’t check one’s environment for threats when it is so utterly ordinary and routine.
Certainly one doesn’t expect one’s neck to be staved in by maniacs who should have been out of society one way or another years ago.
The lack of proper reportage is what destroys trust in media – whatever is left of it. And this case – the suspect – is emblematic of how judges don’t seem to understand power laws where a tiny percentage of offenders are responsible for a HUGE amount of actual crime.
D.A.
NYC
The Sudan migration video reminded me of the wonderful Namibiacam live streams:
https://www.youtube.com/@NamibiaCam
Stark contrast in literacy between neighbors Afghanistan and Turkmenistan!
And North Korea beats South Korea, and Greenland beats its colonial oppressor state of Denmark! If Greenland’s culture is anything like next-door Baffin Island in Canada, they might have surveyed the government bureaucrats from Copenhagen who run the place, but not the indigenous locals. Oh, look, there’s the absolute strong-man human-rights-free dictatorship of Uzbekistan sitting proudly at 100%, the best in Central Asia. Ukraine has been heroically busy with other matters, so President Zelenskyy could be excused for telling the clipboard people to just put down 100% and stop bothering him. Norway may have prudently decided the migrant slums were too dangerous to send blue-eyed blonde women in to survey so they just measured ethnic Norwegian neighbourhoods. The Finns are probably doing something right. But it means there are no mentally retarded children in any of those 100% countries who sadly cannot be taught to read.
Really, there is no statistical difference between 99.98% and 100%. 99.98% is the probability that a flipped U.S. nickel will not land on its edge. To find the two in 10,000 people in your country who somehow never learned to read and write you have to use a fine-toothed comb. The 100% category is surely there for bragging rights at the dictatorship club.
I wonder about the truth of the baby otter rescue. I’ve seen a few that are very likely fake (like the one where a “starvin’ wild kitten, who never knew love” was rescued. Only its clearly not starving, and is completely socialized to the human ‘rescuers’), and so this one too invites suspicion.
How does one happen to be recording on a phone just when an adorable animal is calling to them? Why would the otter have no fear? Who edits and puts a sappy music track to the recorded clips?
“We can’t arrest our way out of issues”!!?? You literally can separate violent lunatics from the rest of society. It is honestly hard for me to think of something dumber to say. The Stuart-Williams tweet is interesting because I wonder if this mayor is part of the 90% or believes this nonsense. I guess if you are convinced of the theory that our society is producing these kinds of people you might believe it. It makes a lot more sense that some fraction of men are just very dangerous. Even if you believed society is producing these people it would still be indefensible to leave innocent civilians vulnerable. So I guess you could even grant it is part genetic and part culture/society, but separating them from civilians is still the morally correct thing to do. Ahhhhh!! Gonna need a Great Depression for the Democrats to win.
The Wikipedia story on the Charlotte slaying is disingenuous. It hyperlinks “pocketknife” to its page on pocketknives, like a Swiss Army knife. But a knife that can be “flipped open”, which sounds to me without using two hands, is a switchblade, not a pocketknife. To open a pocketknife you insert your thumbnail into a groove in the back of the blade where it rests proud of the handle and pull it out with a steady motion, not a “flip”, until the leaf spring that initially resists it gives it a soft lock. This makes pocketknives useless for stabbing because the blade will fold during the thrust and cut your fingers which are grasping the handle. There is also no guard to prevent your sweaty and bloody hand from slipping down onto the blade as the blade meets resistance. I doubt the murder weapon was a pocketknife.
A switchblade is opened one-handed, either by pressing a button that allows a spring to protrude the blade longitudinally to a hard lock, or by flicking the handle so centrifugal force will eject the blade, again to a lock. Either type of one-handed action makes the device a prohibited weapon in Canada. North Carolina permits possession but prohibits concealed carriage in public. This suggests to me that the assailant had murder on his mind which goes against the M’Naughten admonition never to hang a halfwit.
My daily pocketknife opens quite readily and quickly with one hand and the blade locks in place. It is not a switchblade. Note the thumb stud at the inner top of the open blade.
https://kershaw.kaiusa.com/blur-navy-blue-stonewash.html
Re Julie Bindel she has been a lifelong feminist and a great journalist at supporting women.
What is particularly obnoxious about Pride in Surrey is the now convicted child rapist the head of the organisation was feted and lauded by the authorities
https://x.com/ripx4nutmeg/status/1903717094086099425
The media have published zip about it all. Britain seems to be very adept at ignoring scandals whilst hoping it will all go away. Jimmy Saville may have been one of the best known ones and no lessons have been learnt.
The Charlotte crime is another example where evil and stupidity are hard to separate.
The mayor’s response is of course callously indifferent. I checked Wikipedia about Charlotte, and apparently it’s not at all “by and large a safe city”:
And then there is the fairy tale of “addressing mental health”, as if prolific offenders could just be treated with magic pills cruelly withheld from these mentally ill. It’s also a form of dualism and blank slatism. There is nothing in Darwin that implies criminal behaviour must be maladaptive or diseased. Some people are just born vicious, and left to themselves they will live out their nasty tendencies to the full. The offender here also began his criminal career around puberty, years before the typical onset of schizophrenia.
Re the ampersand and ligatures. I learned of this watching a Milk Carton Kids concert https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gL8eBrhVTJ4. The ampersand discussion starts in earnest at 42 min.
Regarding how medical miracles are judged, I saw a great talk by a physician and historian of science who was asked by the Vatican to provide an evaluation of potential miracles. She also wrote a book. I cannot find the Maclean Center seminar link, but I think it was Jacalyn Duffin who wrote this book:
https://global.oup.com/academic/product/medical-miracles-9780195336504?cc=ca&lang=en&n
Her talk was fascinating.
Re David Baltimore — see TWiV 100 interview with Alan Dove & Vincent Racaniello.
Baltimore was always clear that he was interested in Howard Temin’s work. Temin’s lab had worked out the replication cycle of Rous Sarcoma Virus (RVS), a retrovirus, Baltimore realized that the RSV virion almost certainly must contain enzyme activity to copy DNA from the viral RNA template. His lab quickly isolated RT from RSV & notified Temin, whose lab was on a similar track, and so the papers published were back-to back in Nature.
TWiV 904: 50 Years of Reverse Transcriptase May 2022 — V.R. at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory speaking David Baltimore, John Coffin, and Harold Varmus about the discovery in 1970 of retroviral reverse transcriptase and its impact on life sciences research.
(1079 – 82 V.R. was a post doc in J.B.’s lab, interesting work on polio virus).